


Keep My Heart Slow

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-14 01:18:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9150430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: Leo Fitz and Jemma Simmons meet seven times.  The time is different and the place is different and even they are different each time.  Somehow they're still the same. (A FS reincarnation AU)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written ages ago over on Tumblr when I was taking prompts and finally cross-posted here. It should properly go in the drabble collection but I like it so much that I wanted it to hang out on its own. 
> 
> Title from Mumford and Sons "I Will Wait".

The first time, they are both trees. He is an oak and she is a pine. They grow on opposite sides of the forest but their branches stretch towards each other anyways and many years later, they get close enough to almost touch. Lightning strikes him, charring his trunk and hollowing him out, before they ever can.

The second time, they don’t speak each other’s language. He is the youngest son of a Pictish chief, all awkward limbs and uncertain words, sent south on a raid beyond the great stone wall. She is a Roman general’s daughter and by all the rules and rites, she should be safe at home in Londinium. But she pleaded with her father until he let her come along to collect northern mosses and when they catch a band of raiders, she pleads with her father to let Fitz live. There’s something in his remarkably blue eyes that she recognizes and later, after her father lets him go and he runs back north beyond the wall, she’ll find herself sketching out his eyes next to her notes about mosses. She’ll go back to Rome in a month, to wed the ambitious young senator her father has picked out for her and give birth to children who will serve the empire. Years later, she’ll find herself sketching out his eyes again in the dust of her villa and will scratch it out before her husband can see. He’ll paint her on a rock in a series of elaborate swirls that archaeologists will try to decipher centuries later and never quite figure out.

The third time, she is a village healer and they almost burn her for a witch. Her pots and potions and herbal remedies have nothing to do with magic, but from the years of careful notes she’s taken on the healing properties of the local plants. The people in the village don’t much care to read them. Fitz sees the pile of wood at the stake when he rides down from the castle on some errand for his lord father and forgets everything that he’s been told about keeping the peace in the village. The village had helped his sister Skye through her difficult childbirth and found a pot of ointment for their old cook’s hands and, on one memorable occasion, stopped him from picking a bad bunch of mushrooms. They’d been younger then and when she’d slapped the mushrooms out of his hand, he’d shouted at her before he’d thanked her. Her eyes had blazed in her face when she’d shouted right back and he’d felt his heart leap right out of his chest.

Now, when he finds the cell where they’re keeping her, she looks very small and very brave, face pale and dark hair falling in strands around her face. He doesn’t think about how he’s going to get her out, just that he has no other choice but to do it. So when the witch vanishes from her cell that night, the village just thinks that the devil took her. And so when Fitz watches her ride away, he knows that he’ll never be able to see her again.

The fourth time, in a small English country town where a witch was rescued centuries ago, they have time. She is marrying his best friend and he is due to be sent into the field against Napoleon, but they have time in drawing rooms and gardens and ballrooms where they talk and talk. Privately, she steals glances at his blue eyes and the set of his shoulders in his red coat and can’t help wondering if she knows him from somewhere. “We must have met before,” Jemma tells him. “At some deadly dull garden party or in the midst of a country dance.”

“I’m not really one for society,” Fitz shrugs and draws in on himself, hunching up his shoulders. “And I think I would have remembered meeting you, Miss Simmons.”

“Are you sure? You didn’t help me over a puddle or fetch me a glass of lemonade at a ball when someone forced you into playing the gentleman?” Jemma teases.

“I’m hardly gentry. Barely fit for polite company, gears and all.:

“Well, you’re always welcome in my company,” she blurts out. They stare at each other, just for a minute, and Jemma rushes away before she can say anything else so ill-advised.

Three months later, when they receive the letter that he’s been killed in action, she sobs her heart out for weeks.

The fifth time, it is him who is engaged to someone else and Jemma handles it with considerably less grace than he does. She scoffs at anyone who would marry “a jumped-up coal millionaire” and shoots him deathly glares whenever he dares to darken the ballrooms of New York society. Fitz glares right back at her and mocks her blue blood and turned-up nose to anyone who’ll hear it. Neither of them would like to admit that they want each other rather desperately. 

The night before his wedding, she pretends to be drunk off champagne and kisses him in a garden. It is more bitter than sweet, his hands rumpling the silk of her dress and her kiss so fierce that it draws blood, but it is their first kiss in nearly two thousand years.

The sixth time, he knows that he loves her and loses her anyway. He is a code-breaker at Bletchley Park, numbers running through his bones, and she is with the SOE. She speaks four different languages, is an expert in biology, and could kill a man with a high-heeled shoe. Fitz thinks she might be the most amazing women he has ever met. 

They only meet a few times, dinners and drinks and one long slow dance to a swing band, but he puts a ring on her finger the last time that he sees her. “I’ll get you a better one when you come back from France,” he says. “One with a real diamond, once the war is over.”

“This one’s perfect,” Jemma breathes and leans up to kiss him. “I won’t be gone long, I promise. Just a routine mission.”

They never declare her dead, not officially. Fitz keeps the case file next to his bed for the rest of his life.

The seventh time, they are seventeen and brilliant and have no idea what to do when they’re faced with each other. Fitz has an idea that they’ve met before the Academy, somehow, somewhere, sometime, but she has him too tongue-tied to even ask the question. Finally, he takes a deep breath and sticks his hand out. “Fitz,” he says. “Engineering.”

“Simmons,” she says, her eyes going wide when their hands touch. “Biochem.”


End file.
